[00:00:02] Speaker A: KMUD Podcast presents.
Good evening and welcome to the show. This is global stuff. My name is Jimmy Dershlag. The fourth Friday of the month and sometimes we're pre recorded, sometimes we're live. This time we're live in the studio and we'll have our guest live, I hope. Do we have him yet? We've got him. Great. And we can't. We'll be taking your calls later in the show.
Usually in the second half we take calls from folks and I'm very pleased to welcome back for this post Christmas pre New Year's show guest who's been on pretty regularly. Friend of the show, I'd say that's Stephen Zunis. He's a professor of politics and international studies at the University of San Francisco. He was the founding director there the program in Middle Eastern studies and he recognized as one of the country's Leading scholars of U.S. middle East east policy, strategic nonviolent action. Welcome to the show. Stephen, are you there? Do we have you?
[00:01:31] Speaker B: Great to be with you again, Jimmy.
[00:01:33] Speaker A: Yeah, great. I'm glad you could make the time in this holiday season. Hope you're having happy holidays. Anyway, I keep getting pleasant. I've been getting keep getting all Alexa telling me that there's big surf advisories in San Francisco, so you must have some high tides crashing there. I guess.
[00:01:55] Speaker B: I actually live down in Santa Cruz and we lost a chunk of our wharf a few days ago.
[00:02:00] Speaker A: I heard that.
[00:02:02] Speaker B: And damage in the yacht harbor and a lot of driftwood and pieces of the wharf on area beaches. So it's been pretty exciting here.
[00:02:09] Speaker A: Yeah. Very crazy.
[00:02:10] Speaker B: Really. Sorry about the damage though. There is that little kid in me who thinks it's really cool to see these giant waves smashing against the rocks and spraying and everything.
[00:02:19] Speaker A: Yeah. The Santa Grooves waterfront has been real challenged. I know. I have some friends that I visited there and they've been trying to repair that for a while. So now they've got to go at it again. I guess so Anyway, the impetus behind bringing you on, although we love to bring you on periodically. A recent article that was posted an interview you did with Counterpunch about the ousting of the Assad regime. And that's certainly something that you followed regularly in your writings and studies of Syria and the Middle East. And that's certainly a topic that's been in the news a lot.
And that's just a very dramatic action that just happened with the rebels. The Hayat Tahir Al Sham, also known as HDS hts recently taking over a dramatic part of the country. And Bashar Al Assad, the person who's been in charge there since 2000, gone from the country. Maybe you can give the listeners who aren't necessarily familiar with that whole process of what, what happened with all those recent events, at least a summary of it.
[00:03:42] Speaker B: Well, the dynastic dictatorship of the Assad family, which has ruled Syria for 54 years, was toppled, was overthrown. That Bashar Assad fled to, to Russia, which had been one of his major benefactor supporters.
He was the last of the military based secular nationalist regimes that had at one time, you know, play a prominent role in the Middle east, though some of them. And actually Syria did bring, you know, some redistribution of wealth, some, some socialist initiatives and strong nationalist efforts against Western imperialism and the like, like, like a number of these regimes, uh, you know, such as uh, the uh, Saddam Hussein's government in uh, Iraq, it slid into uh, increasingly repressive authoritarianism. Uh, the um, the only way that the younger Assad liberalized from his father was economically. So what had been a semi socialist authoritarian state evolved more into a kind of crony capitalist state where inequality and corruption was along with the worsening repression, led to a point where there was a initially non violent pro democracy uprising. In 2011, about the same time of similar uprisings elsewhere in the Arab world.
Assad cracked down brutally gunning down thousands of unarmed demonstrators. It got to the point where a lot of the soldiers ended up deserting the army, brought their guns with them and formed a group called the Free Syrian army, which for a time got some support from the United States. But it wasn't long before the nonviolent struggle was eclipsed by the armed struggle. And the armed struggle became dominated by these hard line Salafist Islamist groups, some of which had ties to Al Qaeda and other extremists. Most the US never armed the Islamists directly, but the arms we gave to the more moderate secular groups often ended up in the hands of the Islamists. And since they were more powerful in part because they were getting some support from the reactionary regimes and the, in the Gulf region, you know, were willing to fight under their command, you know, as a unified front against the, against the regime.
The.
What happened. Thanks. It's very unlikely that Assad would have survived given his lack of support. But he was rescued in large part by the, the Russians, which ended up with a horrific bombing campaign in urban areas controlled by the rebels, the Hezbollah, the Shia militia in Lebanon which had fought both Israel and fought in support of the rights of the Shia population. There In a much less popular move among the Lebanese and others went into Syria to support Assad in suppressing the resistance. Meanwhile, Iran brought in various support including some allied militia tied very closely to the regime there. And it pushed back the various rebel factions to only controlling a small area of UP in the Idlib province not far from Aleppo. Meanwhile, ISIS for a time took over a large part of the northeast. The Obama administration in 2016 stopped all support for Syrian rebels for fear that if they won the hardcore Islamists would take over.
And only armed Syrians, mostly Kurds, who are willing to fight ISIS not, not the Assad regime. Things have been more or less at a. At A and the one group that again has had some degree of autonomy, some degree of a progressive agenda, some degree of democracy were the autonomous Rojova Kurdish region in the northeast, which ironically got support from everybody from anarchists and other leftists who really appreciated their, their, the economic, social and political system they'd established. But ironically also from the United States because again they were in the lead in the fight against isis. But in terms of Assad, people figure that you know, he, he had won for, for all intents and purposes, but as you know, starting a little over a month ago, HTS so the, the largest of the armed opposition groups, again a hard line Islamist organization, though it has moderated somewhat from this earlier incarnations as an Al Qaeda affiliate, ended up attacking some Syrian army positions in retaliation for some airstrikes that killed a number of civilians in Idlib. And much to their surprise, the Syrian army fled and they kept advancing and ended up moving into Aleppo and, and taking over that major city, second largest in, in the country.
And, and then they decided they'd see how far they could go and they, within a very short period of time they ended up marching into Damascus. And what's, what's crucial about this is that it was not a really a military victory by HTS because there really was very little fighting. It was a political collapse of the regime. Many ways it's very similar to what we saw in Afghanistan a few years ago when it was clear that no matter how God awful the Taliban was, the US backed regime of warlords and crooks and opium magnets and you know, other nasties just did not have the, a support of the Afghan people or some of us are old enough to remember what happened the spring of 1975 with the THI regime in South Vietnam.
Again, it was more of a political collapse because when you, when you, when you have soldiers who aren't willing to Fight and die on your behalf and your foreign support is no longer there. Your days are numbered. Meanwhile, in the southern part of, in the far south of Syria where the revolution started in 2011, the Workers Councils, the popular committees ended up seizing government buildings there. This is the largely nonviolent grassroots efforts that are not affiliated with the hardcore Islamists. So there's really.
And they moved in Damascus in both directions and again the regime ended up fleeing.
[00:11:16] Speaker A: Well, so you mentioned the 2011 that although I guess there's been pushback against the administration by all these various groups for a long time. But 2011 kind of sowed the seeds of that, even though the Assad regime pushed back and was violently repressive. And I guess we can talk about some of the things that have been uncovered since the fall of the regime, such as the Said Naya prison and all the atrocities that were committed. But there was a huge crackdown. But at the same time there was in the regions HTS and some of these other groups were still establishing a base in those regions from which the current actions and the ultimate defeat of the overthrow of the regime came out of that. Because they had the support of a lot of the local places, right?
[00:12:23] Speaker B: Yes, yes. The HTS and some allied groups, including the Turkish backed militia that was remnants of the original US backed Free Syrian army, they effectively ran much of that province. They were conservative, they were autocratic, but they were not. They allowed non, they allowed religious minorities to, to worship freely.
They didn't insist that women cover up. They, you know, definitely tried to, they're trying to make clear that they're not simply another Taliban and that gives some hope that the, the new government won't be terribly repressive. But at the same, and indeed they, they, they, they may recognize that in order to rebuild the country they need to include as many people as possible and bring back the refugees and bring back the, the engineers, the doctors, the other professionals and those that they need to rebuild this shattered society. And you know, a lot of people are worried, reasonably so, because of HTS's ideological foundation as an Al Qaeda affiliate extremist organization.
Their leader was radicalized by the U.S. like many people in that part of the world, by the US invasion of Iraq. And he was part of the Al Qaeda resistance against the US occupation. That's how he got his start. But I know every Syrian that I know who tends, and my Syrian friends tend to be liberal to leftist secular people that they're nervous, but they are primarily relieved, indeed joyous that Assad is overthrown. I mean, their thinking is under him, as many as a half million Syrians died. Over 11 million people, that is over half population were displaced, half of whom were refugees outside the country, half of whom internally displaced. Many of the city's great, many of the country's great cities and landmarks are in ruins.
Tens of thousands of people, many tens of thousands have been jailed and tortured. Indeed, as it appears now, at least 70,000 of those taken prisoners were tortured to death or otherwise summarily executed.
And of course, the international sanctions and other problems have, you know, destroyed the economy. I mean, the country.
They figure that, well, could it really be any worse? And it's possible that HTS could end up trying to impose a hard line Islamist rule, but probably no worse than some of the Gulf states that the US supports and I think certainly better than the ongoing war and suffering and brutality that the Assyrians have experienced under Assad.
[00:15:55] Speaker A: I want to remind the listeners this is global stuff. My guest is Steven Zunis, who is a professor of politics and international studies at the University of San Francisco.
He's the founding director of their program in Middle Eastern studies there, an expert on the area. We're talking about Syria and the developments that have happened, as many people are aware of the overthrow of the, the Assad regime that happened.
He was gone from the country earlier this month, December 8, a couple weeks ago, went to Russia, got Russia, which was a big supporter of his regime, one of the main supporters of his regime along with Iraq and Iran.
And they, so they've given him refuge there while the country's been taken over, at least part of it. And that's what I wanted to talk about next. You've already talked about the fact that the Salafists, which is the HTS group, are a fundamentalist group. But there's openings and we'll probably talk about that, more openings for some potential for, for some kind of pluralism in order for it to function. But when we've talked about Syria in the past on this program, when you look at it, and as you've already mentioned, and there's a lot of factions involved in addition to HTs, and when you look at a map of the country, it doesn't seem to me that maybe HTS has taken over the main government in Damascus, but there's still large parts of the country that are held or controlled by other groups, isn't that correct?
[00:17:43] Speaker B: That's true. In terms of geography, in terms of population, the vast majority of the Syrian population lives in the, the western quarter or third of the country and HTS controls virtually all of that.
But yes, it is still, but it's still divided. There's still millions of Syrians who are out of their control and they're really pushing to try to assert control over these remaining parts of the country. One big concern a lot of us have as a fatah of Rodroba, the Kurdish controlled areas that, where they have, you know, created a good semblance of democratic self governance. The Turkey and its allied Syrian groups are fighting to, to, to capture that.
And there, there's been some major, major battles there. It's one of many situations you've run in, in Syria and elsewhere where you have the, that both sides are armed by the United States, both the Turkish government, which is a NATO member and the, and the Kurds, which again armed by the US to fight isis. We also of course have the phenomenon of American troops that are stationed in parts of Syria, some in sort of the south central desert region near where Jordan and Iraq come together and others more in the northeast where the oil fields and some other valuable natural resources are. Of course they were there against the will of the Syrian government under Assad. I am assuming that the HTs would like them gone too.
And they, you know, there are some people who think, have argued that it's good for the United States to be there because you know, protect the Kurds, you know, from the Turks. But the US has done little to protect them from the Turks in any case. And you know, there's, there are questions about the legality of the US troops being there. I mean the, the ISIS has largely been defeated. They used to control a big swath of territory in, in northeastern Syria, but you know, they're down to a few, you know, pockets of resistance. Not, not, not something you'd necessarily put on a map. And the US has tried to justify its, its presence there to counter the Iranian influence and the, and, and you know, put and, and other for, and, and to try to have a more of a political presence which really doesn't seem to be justified. I see it establishes a very dangerous precedent for the United States to say we don't, we don't, we have to have troops there to counter the political orientation of the regime because we didn't like the Russians and Iranians being there. Well, we don't have that excuse anymore. We're not protecting the Kurds. ISIS has largely been defeated. And so it raises the question about why do we still have troops there. And indeed there was never congressional approval for sending American troops. So it raises Legal questions in terms of domestic law, not just international law.
Now, now, Trump could very well decide to remove these troops from Syria. They're in very vulnerable positions in these small forward operating bases out in the desert. But the concern there is will he do it in such a way that will allow the, the Turks and their authoritarian minded leader, Erdogan, who is who Trump likes, to come and then continue its savage repression against the Kurds there.
[00:21:37] Speaker A: So in effect, that's in the northeast part of the country where there's what, 2,000 U.S. troops stationed there now? Yes, Approximately, yeah.
[00:21:48] Speaker B: I mean, Trump said he was bringing the troops home from Syria when he was there before, but in fact he redeploy them from where they are protecting the Kurdish population and move them over to the oil fields and other, other strategic assets that he wanted to have, have control over and, and did nothing when the Turks came in and started slaughtering Kurdish civilians, including a prominent feminist leader and, and others.
[00:22:18] Speaker A: Could that area be a proxy for Turkey if the US does pull out against.
[00:22:23] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, that's a concern.
Those of us who have opposed US Intervention in Syria, you know, do recognize that, you know, they have at times, you know, been, you know, been a deterrent to more to Turkish aggression. But as we've done many times in history, it appears we're willing to abandon the Kurds. And generally what a lot of us have been advocating is an idea that the US Would make a deal with the Turks, basically saying that, okay, we're going to pull out, but you can't advance any further. If you do, we'll cut off military aid and arms transfers. Another strategic cooperation. But unfortunately, I don't think Trump has any intention of doing that.
[00:23:17] Speaker A: And I wanted to go into the actions of Israel because that's been a major factor there. According to the UK based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, that it's documented more than, and this was a while ago, so there have been many more since. More than 350 strikes by Israel since the fall of the Assad regime. And they're doing it all over the country. Damascus, Aleppo and Hamar. So what's Israel intends there and what, what are their actions causing? How will that affect this transition?
[00:23:54] Speaker B: Well, taking advantage, taking advantage of the chaos and disarray with the defeat of the regime, where the whole command and control structure had broken down, they launched this major assault, essentially destroying their navy in port, destroying airfields around the country, both military and civilian, suspected weapon depots and manufacturing centers, army bases, government buildings related to security.
They basically wanted to totally destroy any capability of self defense or anything that the Syrians might offer.
And with that largely done, they ended up going beyond the area of southwestern Syria they've occupied since 1967 in the Golan region and by essentially tearing up the Kissinger, Kissinger's disengagement agreement that he negotiated in 1974, and moving deep deeper inside of Syria, including seizing Mount Hermon, the 12,000 foot peak which is the largest in the area. Already Israelis are talking about building a ski resort there.
And the U.S. even though we are a guarantor of the disengagement agreement in 1974, there's been no objections by the Biden administration about Israeli aggression. And it really, it sends us some, several messages that the new government is going to have to consider. One is that the, the west, particularly the United States is willing to see their, their, their assets strategic and otherwise destroyed, more of their land taken. And this could very well, you know, drive them back to a more hardline policy both domestically and, and foreign.
And the other, the other thing of course, is that the United States is the only country in the world that has formally recognized Israel's illegal annexation of the Golan, which it did in 1981. In response, United Nations Security Council unanimously condemned the move and said the annexation is null and void based on the concept that no country can expand its territory by force. No country can unilaterally change its international boundaries. That's the justification we've been using for supporting Ukraine all this time. But the Biden administration argues that no, in the case of an ally, when they invade and occupy and annex and expand their territory by force, it's okay. This is amazing because Reagan, even Reagan supported the resolution calling it null and void. But Biden is essentially saying Reagan is too liberal and too attached to international law and that what Israel's done is right. And it's amazing. If you look at any world map, you know, Rand McNally, National Geographic, you know, the Google Apple, you know, the, the Golan is seen either as part of Syria or hash marks or a dotted line or something showing its special status, but in the US Government maps it's all part of Israel.
And again, it's just really. And indeed the Russians ended up citing the US Recognition of Israel's annexation, the Golan, at a United nations debate over Ukraine to, to make the case that the United States really wasn't about upholding a rules based international order because you know, they are quite willing to support, you know, the very kind of land grabs and aggression that the Russians have been involved in.
[00:27:56] Speaker C: KMUD is a community radio station in the Redwood region of Northern California. Donate to support People powered
[email protected].
[00:28:09] Speaker A: Again I want to remind the listeners this is global stuff. My name is Jimmy Derschlag. My guest for this show bringing him back on to discuss a very current situation happening in the Middle East. The transition, the overthrow of the Assad regime in Syria, the transition to a new government and all the forces that are at play there. Steven Zunis, the professor of politics and International studies at the University of San Francisco. So glad that he's with us today. I'm sure acclimated six months since you've been back from your visiting professorship in Sweden. So that was a great honor that you had. I'm sure you appreciated that.
[00:29:01] Speaker B: It is also an example of just how isolated the United States is in the world on Middle east policy.
The UN Security Council resolutions we have vetoed as the only negative vote and otherwise unanimous resolutions being one of only less than 10 countries and 193 member UN General assembly to vote against these broad based resolutions upholding international law and human rights.
The others voting no were pretty much exclusively far right wing governments like Hungary and Argentina or these economically dependent tiny Pacific island states.
But it's really pretty. I mean, I mean Israel has announced it's doubling its settlements in the occupied Golan. These are clear violations the fortune of a convention which prohibit any country from moving civilians onto territories seized by military force. But in the Biden's. Biden's view, Biden administration's view is not occupied territory anymore. It is now part of Israel. So it is therefore. Okay. And again it's just stunning that the just how.
What an outlier the United States is internationally in terms of some of the most basic principles of international law. Like you can't just invade other countries and colonize them.
[00:30:35] Speaker A: This is a call in show and this is a good time to open up the lines. And it looks like there's already somebody calling in. Will give Michael a chance to get that caller on the air and we'll see what they want to talk about.
So I guess they're ready to go. Hi, welcome to the show.
[00:30:56] Speaker D: So again you can't thank enough this opportunity with KMUD and the free speech radio. Speech is threatened.
Knowledge is threatened. We live in a moment where fact is suspect. We have less than a calendar month for a very threatening change in our overall governance. You know it's interesting, I have to recognize that individual one speaks to fragments of truth from time to time about the overreach of the state.
But we're looking at a moment historically where the constitution has been violated by allowing an insurrectionist to achieve the state of presidency. Again, it's a clear violation of law. And again, thank you to KMOD News for having a constitutional professor spouse upon that tonight on our free speech radio waves. All right, my point would be this. When we're talking about these numbers of, you know, Azerbaijan, are they going to react because the Russians shot down a civilian airplane?
The casualty of war, the AI assassination of children wiping out lineage in Palestine, we're looking at the study of war. So my question of you as a study professor is are we really looking at the fact that, that the monetization behind militarization overwhelms even the corporation of democracy, that it's so overwhelming these money whores would continue to threaten our peace on a declining environmental planet? War is a huge environmental disaster, not just a humanitarian disaster.
[00:33:25] Speaker B: Certainly the military. The Pentagon is the world's number one for goodness sake.
[00:33:29] Speaker D: They should be in a rational mind. And folks, if you're listening, support this free speech radio. It's all we got.
[00:33:36] Speaker A: All right, well let's let Professor Zunis talk.
[00:33:40] Speaker B: Good point. Certainly the, the Penthagon is the world's number one carbon emitter. And it's really hard to believe that when occasionally some good climate related legislation comes through that the same members of Congress, you know, support for an $865 billion Pentagon budget that doesn't even count the nuclear side of the military which is under the Energy Department or does account the CIA and its huge, huge budget which is secret.
And you know, the, the C130 cargo planes which take our troops and our tanks to the Middle east and elsewhere. I mean it's, you know, the, the dumps more carbon into the atmosphere than any of us could imagine using in our entire lifetimes. And so, and this is not really talked about and I think the fact that we do have such, and the fact that one of the reasons that Democrats have been losing white working class voters is that Trump disingenuously has talked about bringing the troops home, of not getting involved in these, these foreign affairs and, and disingenuously said that he opposed the Iraq war when he actually supported it. But you know, that was used against Clinton, it was used against Biden, it was used against Schumer. A lot of, you know, Democrats who support support the invasion of Iraq, which is what created isis and a lot of the problems that were now being used as an excuse to send even More troops to the region.
And because it's the sons and daughters of these working class people who are, who are sent off. And I remember when Trump announced he was pulling troops away from Syria, he said, I'm bringing the troops home. This is at a rally in Texas. And people started chanting, bring the troops home. Bring the troops home. Bring the troops home. And I thought, wow, a Republican rally in Texas, you know, and this is an example, I think that, that how there's been a big shift in people not wanting the US to be spending all this, all this money in these lives. And, and as the caller pointed out, the, the, the, the damage it's doing to the global environment. And neither party has been able to really, you know, tackle this kind of, you know, the importance that we have other priorities. The big threat is not isis. It's not these, you know, governments that fail to abide by, you know, us hegemonic priorities. The biggest threat is indeed the climate. And so the, that, you know, we, this is all, you know, come comes down. And this is why when I talk about things in the Middle East, I really, even when talking about Israel and Palestine, I think the, the talk about AIPAC and the Israel lobby is grossly exaggerated, frankly, because, you know, this, this, what we're doing in the Middle east is the same thing we did in Central America, in Southeast Asia, in Southern Africa and and elsewhere in, in, in, in, in for far right wing regimes that have engaged in genocide and other forms of repression. We support tyrants in the Middle east the same reason we support tyrants in Latin America and elsewhere. That the problem is much bigger than a single lobby. The problem is the whole military industrial complex, overly militarized focus of our foreign policy.
[00:37:32] Speaker A: Again, we're speaking with Steven Zunis, professor of Politics and International Studies at the University of San Francisco. You can call in 707-923-3911. Probably that number is ingrained in the brains of many people after our membership drives and all the other times you've heard it. So we do appreciate that caller's comments going on with the. We were talking about Israel.
You know, Trump has said that it's not our fight when he was asked about Syria, but we know how much he considers Bibi Netanyahu his buddy and how supportive Biden and his administration and most American administrations have been of Israel.
I was reading an article in Al Jazeera about a part of you would know where that is in Syria.
[00:38:32] Speaker B: I've been there actually.
[00:38:32] Speaker A: Yeah, where there's basically Israel is control has its checkpoints in that Syria village and controlling destroying homes there and controlling.
[00:38:43] Speaker B: That Canetra was the capital. It's actually more than bigger than a village. It was capital of the province which is of clue the Golan and Israel initially seized it in the 1967 war and part of Kissinger's disengagement agreement. They would agree to withdraw slightly including giving Syrians Conetra back. But they ended up physically destroying almost the entire town. The Syrians haven't rebuilt it because much of the it was a big agricultural center in the farmlands and on three sides are under Israeli occupation. But also frankly, it's a propaganda and a tool to take visitors such as such as me. I was in a delegation there back in the 90s led by John B. Anderson, the former a moderate Republican congressman from Illinois who'd run for president in 1980. But they've now but some people definitely live there now. The Israelis have taken it again and is basically treating it like occupied territory, like in the west bank where you have to go through checkpoints to go anywhere.
[00:39:52] Speaker A: Let me jump in because we do have some callers and I want to give them some time. So I hope the callers will hang in there. Hi, welcome to the show. You're on the air.
[00:40:01] Speaker E: I would love to hear your guest Steven's opinion about in recent memory when Netanyahu spoke before the Senate and Congress, Harris and Biden, Biden refused to be there. I mean they made a statement at that point that pretty much spoke against Netanyahu and his visit. And then what the hell happened there? How did we get, how have we gotten to where we are at this point in terms of in Biden's last month now and this whole year of Gaza to have been in this position of being the primary supporters of this war and of the weapons. And can you please explain that Biden's.
[00:41:04] Speaker B: Been the primary supporter from the get go. He's had some specific disagreements with Netanyahu on some things. He didn't like the way the House Republican leadership was using Netanyahu's visit for political advantage. But there's no shift and Biden was always one of the biggest hawks when it came to the Middle east in the Senate. He as head of Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he pushed through the Iraq war opposition, didn't allow people opposed to the war to testify and basically was totally in league with Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and on Israel. He's also always been a big, big hawk.
And so his attacks against the International Criminal Court, his attacks against the International Court of Justice, his attacks against Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. He really is extreme and very much an outlier in the international community. Just a few weeks ago, he welcomed Yoav Gallant, the former Israeli Defense Minister at the White House. He is an indicted war criminal. He's been indicted right by the ICC for, for war crimes, including crimes against humanity, along with Netanyahu. And 124 countries would have arrested him if he'd gone. But he's, but Biden welcomes him. I mean, you know, I think we're going to look back at Biden the way we look back at Lyndon Johnson and that he has surprisingly progressive domestic record and did some good things about his legacy is going to be him supporting a genocidal war as, as we think of Lyndon Johnson in the case of, case of Vietnam.
[00:42:45] Speaker A: Well, she was asking how we got here, but as you're saying, it's been.
[00:42:51] Speaker B: You know, the Democratic Party establishment isn't listening to its people. They, they basically take the line that, oh, what are you going to do? Vote Republican? You know, we'll do what we want here. I mean, 80% of Democrats want to cease fire. The vast majority of Democrats want the 80% of Democrats want the US to condition military aid to Israel. The vast majority of Democrats, you know, want the US to recognize Palestine along with Israel.
These are all policies that the, you know, Biden has, has rejected, as have the Democratic leaders in Congress, Schumer in the Senate and Jeffries in the House. And so we have, you know, Nancy Pelosi insisting that anti war protesters are agents of Russia and China. I mean, we're having, I mean, it's ridiculous. We only got 19 senators to support a very modest effort to withhold certain specific kinds of weapons that were being used in major atrocities against civilian population centers.
The, the Democratic leadership is more out of touch with its constituents on this than any other issue. And by this, I don't just mean Israel. You could say the same thing about support for Saudi Arabia and some of the, the Arab, Arab dictatorships. It's it. And, but that's, that's why you have so much, so many protests in the militancy. We've been seeing a lot of college campuses and, and elsewhere that our elected representatives do not represent us. And despite warnings, Harris did not distance herself much from, if at all from Biden's policies alienating Arab Americans, young people, Muslims, progressive voters. At least some of the, it could have made that. It could have even made the difference in the, in the election since it was very close in a number of swing states and we are really in a crisis. This is not, this is a crisis of democracy in many respects when you have a government that is so out of touch with the American people and of course it's only going to get much, much worse.
[00:45:11] Speaker A: Well, we do have another caller been patiently waiting. Hi, thanks for hanging in there. You are now on the air. Welcome to the show.
[00:45:22] Speaker B: So are they using, is Israel using depleted uranium around Gaza and to the north and what's the status on depleted uranium in the Middle east these days? Depleted uranium is usually used to penetrate heavy armored vehicles and the targets for Israel are buildings and tents and you know, they don't need depleted uranium to do their damage. They're willing to drop these huge bombs and these missiles all conveniently supplied by the. Most of them applied by the American taxpayer to go off to go after, you know, various buildings and again largely civilian targets. So I don't think a du is an issue in the, in the current fighting.
[00:46:17] Speaker A: One of the things I noticed is that the way the, the rebels HTS and others were able to scope out what was happening was by the use of drones. I was thinking well where did they get those? Is that, are those through channels that also.
[00:46:35] Speaker B: Yeah, there's a hu black market for arms and even, even drone technology is, is getting simpler and easier to procure.
The, and the fact that they captured a lot of weapons, you know from the, from the Syrians, they've you know, captured some weapons that were given to other moderate groups by the US and others and they have some friends in the Gulf who've supplied them more directly usually with US made equipment. So again the US hasn't directly armed the Islamists but again most of their equipment is of US made.
[00:47:14] Speaker A: One of the things that was predicted, of course there was in the initial euphoric aftermath of the fall of the regime is how many of the people. Well, not only the freeing of the prisoners in the prisons there but also the said Nayan other prisons but also the, the exiles coming back to. Yes, and they're, they're like 30000 or more of them.
[00:47:46] Speaker B: Well there are 6 million exiles and tens of thousands are starting to come back.
Yeah, the, the, I mean again the, the, the terror and repression particularly by the regime but also some rebel factions did lead to this massive exodus and it's, it's, it's really striking because you know the there, you know there are some people in the anti imperialist left and I don't use as a derogatory term. I consider myself part of the anti imperialist left. But there are are some elements that have actually, because we are lied to about Iraq, because we've been lied to about Israel and Palestine and lied to about a lot of things. There are some people who were doubting the reports of the use of chemical weapons and other atrocities by the Assad regime. In this case though, they were indeed mostly true. Indeed. There's a remarkable parallel in many ways between those rationalizing for Assad's war crimes and those for Israeli war crimes. I insist Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch in the UN are biased.
They insist that all the media coverage is biased.
They insist it's all for self defense, that even rescue workers are actually terrorists. I mean, it is quite striking.
The rationalizations for both Israeli war crimes and the Syrian government's war crimes really parallel each other. But I think we need to be really.
And the thing about the Syrians right now, you know, I get a lot of questions in these interviews about what does it mean in terms of Iran's role and Russians role and the geopolitical context, what it means for Israel, this and that and the other. But the fact is the Syrian people don't give a damn really what it means on a geopolitical level. They just want to be freed from a hated regime. And I think we really need to give agency to the people of, of Syria. This is not, you know, I've written books and I've spent my career critiquing US intervention and what it's damage it's done. But the Syrians would have won anyway. Assad would have been overthrown regardless of anything the United States did, regardless of what Israel did. When a regime doesn't have support of the people, it can no longer stay in power.
[00:50:11] Speaker A: And that's your quote. That's getting a little bit of Internet circulation there.
If a regime doesn't have the support of the people, it ultimately will fail. It rests on the willingness of people to obey it. We do have another call.
[00:50:28] Speaker F: I was in Afghanistan many years ago during the Sahar revolution when Muhammad Dawud was overthrown. And I have to say the Afghanis were very, very considerate, Pashtun Wali and all to get me out of there safely. I was by myself. But I've had a fascination for the country ever since. And back to your points about the international arms market, what happened to all that stuff we left there?
[00:50:53] Speaker B: Oh, it's in the hands of the Taliban.
Just like all the stuff we gave the Shah got in the hands of the Islamic Republic and everything we gave the Tea regime and the hands of the Communists. I mean, the like I say, I mean, even ISIS's, most of ISIS's weapons are of US manufacturer that they're able to, you know, seize from Iraqi government positions and and places like that. I mean, that's really the one of the crazy things about the, you know, the arms, the arms sales, arms transfers, arms exports is that, you know, they very often get into the hands of the very forces that the United States opposes, and then that's used as justification for for manufacturing more arms to fight them.
[00:51:41] Speaker A: So we don't have a lot of time left. Again, Steven Zunis, my guest professor of Politics and International Studies, University of San Francisco I wanted to one of the interesting things about that situation right now with the Hayat Tahir Al Sham having overthrown the regime. And now, as I saw today, they're in another article from Al Jazeera from the last couple of days is there's now the the different factions have agreed to unite under the Ministry of Defense that has been set up. So there's some unification of all these different groups that have been fighting in the country for so long. So there seems to be some unification going on among those various elements. But also it's different from some situations in that Russia, China, the U.S. even the UN and Iraq and Iran, who were kind of Russia was supporting, none of those are controlling the factions that are now in power in that country. So it seems like they're somewhat uniquely independent, considering how the major powers try to influence what's going on in these conflict regions around the world.
[00:53:05] Speaker B: Yes. And what we saw and we've seen in Lebanon and Syria and Iraq, in terms of their civil wars, that all sorts of outside powers would try to get in on the action, try to influence the outcome, try to support their favorite factions. Of course, that just ended up in getting a lot more people killed. But I really think that for Syrians right now, their priority, and this is Both for the HTs and ordinary Syrians, is to try to rebuild their savage country, that they really need to focus on rebuilding, on repatriation, on unification. And they really are not do not want to be distracted by the geopolitics. They're obviously going to want some foreign aid, and unfortunately, often foreign aid comes with strings attached, whether it be from the Gulf or from the west or from anywhere else. But I think that the key is rebuilding the country and the level of devastation of which is just hard to imagine.
[00:54:19] Speaker A: And what do you think their Prospects are, do you think they, they have a chance of actually promoting some pluralism and, and not getting wrapped up in the, the fundamentalist aspects?
[00:54:35] Speaker B: I, I don't trust hts, frankly. You know, I think if they could impose a very hard line, a fundamentalist kind of theocracy, that they, they would. But I think they also recognize that, you know, they need the help of all sorts of Syrians. They need the help of the international community.
They do need, for pragmatic reasons, if not for political reasons.
They really need to diversify and have at least some degree of pluralism. I don't really trust them that much. I mean, they can also use the excuse, oh, things are so bad, we have to be tough, we have to be dictatorial and everything. But the very fact that this revolution was initially a civilian based one, was initially a popular pro democracy struggle, that I think there is pressure from below as well.
Just as I noted that Assad's collapse ultimately was because people wouldn't obey him and people didn't recognize his authority, the new government has to, has to deal with that as well. And I was very impressed with how civil society was able to mobilize during the first nine or ten months of revolution. And it was mostly democratic and it was mostly non violent. A lot of these people are dead or in exile, but there are still enough people around that, especially in places like Dara and other areas in the south, that they are rebuilding these popular democratic grassroots institutions and could certainly be, could conceivably be a check on at least some of the authoritarian impulses of the new Syrian leadership.
[00:56:31] Speaker A: Well, thanks so much.
Steven Zunis, professor of Politics International Studies at the University of San Francisco. We really appreciate you making the time to come on the show in this holiday season and share your thoughts. We appreciate the callers and their thoughts as well. I'm sure we'll have you back on. There's always situations that deserve your expertise. Happy New Year to everyone.
Thanks to Michael McCaskill for engineering.
This has been global up. My name's Jimmy Derschlag.
[00:57:08] Speaker C: This has been a K Mutt podcast to listen to other shows and more episodes of this show. Find us on all the platforms where you get your podcast and also on our website, kmud.org.
